Bitcoin mining is competitive and the goal is that you want to solve or “find” a block before anyone else’s miner does. Then you will get the block reward and transaction fees from the block. During the last several years we have seen an incredible amount of hashrate coming online which made it harder to have enough hashrate personally (individually) to solve a block, thus getting the payout reward. To compensate for this pool mining was developed.
Bitcoin mining is intentionally designed to be resource-intensive and difficult so that the number of blocks found each day by miners remains steady. Individual blocks must contain a proof of work to be considered valid. This proof of work is verified by other Bitcoin nodes each time they receive a block. Bitcoin uses the hashcash proof-of-work function.
Bitcoin’s first mover advantage, popularity, and network effect has cemented it as the most popular cryptocurrency with the largest market cap. Rivals like Litecoin may have numerous technical advantages over Bitcoin’s algorithm (see more about that here), but they only hold a fraction of Bitcoin’s market cap and their dwindling communities largely consist of loyalists, speculators, and antagonistic anti-Bitcoin buyers.
Though it is tempting to believe the media's spin that Satoshi Nakamoto is a lone, quixotic genius who created Bitcoin out of thin air, such innovations do not happen in a vacuum. All major scientific discoveries, no matter how original-seeming, were built on previously existing research. There are precursors to Bitcoin: Adam Back’s Hashcash, invented in 1997, and subsequently Wei Dai’s b-money, Nick Szabo’s bit-gold and Hal Finney’s Reusable Proof of Work. The Bitcoin white paper itself cites Hashcash and b-money, as well as various other works spanning several research fields.

Behind the scenes, the Bitcoin network is sharing a massive public ledger called the "block chain". This ledger contains every transaction ever processed which enables a user's computer to verify the validity of each transaction. The authenticity of each transaction is protected by digital signatures corresponding to the sending addresses therefore allowing all users to have full control over sending bitcoins.

Some nodes are mining nodes (usually referred to as "miners"). These group outstanding transactions into blocks and add them to the blockchain. How do they do this? By solving a complex mathematical puzzle that is part of the bitcoin program, and including the answer in the block. The puzzle that needs solving is to find a number that, when combined with the data in the block and passed through a hash function, produces a result that is within a certain range. This is much harder than it sounds.
Bitcoin wallet addresses are case sensitive, usually have 34 characters of numbers and lowercase letters, start with either a 1 or a 3, and never use 0, O, l and I to make every character in the address as clear as possible. That’s a lot to take in. But don’t worry. What they consist of is largely irrelevant to you. Just know they’re a string of characters that denote a destination on the Bitcoin Blockchain.
Bitmain acquired this mining facility in Inner Mongolia a couple years ago and has turned it into one of the most powerful money factories on the Bitcoin network. It quite literally metabolizes electricity into money. By my own calculations, the hardware on the grounds—some 21,000 computers—accounted for about 4 percent of all the computing power in the Bitcoin network when I visited.
Bitcoin may react differently to inflation/deflation: Bitcoin differs significantly from fiat currencies, due to the fact that there is a limited number of bitcoins to be mined. Paper money, on the other hand, can be created at will out of thin air by central banks. Due to its limited supply, Bitcoin may potentially hold its value better than paper money, which can technically have an unlimited supply.
A Bitcoin wallet is also referred to as a digital Wallet. Establishing such a wallet is an important step in the process of obtaining Bitcoins. Just as Bitcoins are the digital equivalent of cash, a Bitcoin wallet is analogous to a physical wallet. But instead of storing Bitcoins literally, what is stored is a lot of relevant information like the secure private key used to access Bitcoin addresses and carry out transactions. The four main types of wallet are desktop, mobile, web and hardware.
Client-side encryption means all of your data is encrypted on your device before any of your information touches the servers. Once your account and everything in it has been encrypted, we automatically back it up. We can’t access your assets or any other information in any usable form but if anything happens to your device, you can just download the Edge app on a new device, enter your username and password and your assets are right where you left them.
Another advancement in mining technology was the creation of the mining pool, which is a way for individual miners to work together to solve blocks even faster. As a result of mining in a pool with others, the group solves many more blocks than each miner would on his own. Bitcoin mining pools exist because the computational power required to mine Bitcoins on a regular basis is so vast that it is beyond the financial and technical means of most people. Rather than investing a huge amount of money in mining equipment that will (hopefully) give you a return over a period of decades, a mining pool allows the individual to accumulate smaller amounts of Bitcoin more frequently.
In 2014 prices started at $770 and fell to $314 for the year.[31] In February 2014 the Mt. Gox exchange, the largest bitcoin exchange at the time, said that 850,000 bitcoins had been stolen from its customers, amounting to almost $500 million. Bitcoin's price fell by almost half, from $867 to $439 (a 49% drop). Prices remained low until late 2016.[citation needed]